The Greatest Defunct Websites and Dotcom Disasters 192
NotableCathy writes "CNet has an interesting retrospective write-up documenting the most notable dotcom disasters and now-defunct Websites that were massive in their day, detailing what happened to them and what they led to. Nupedia didn't escape a slating (remember Larry Sanger's memoir?), or indeed Beenz, whose founder and CEO once said 'would become the universal currency, supplanting all others,' according to The Register seven years ago."
Thank God (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank God (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Thank God (Score:4, Interesting)
Read dot.bomb by David Kuo - a very interesting insider look into what all went wrong in a typical dot.com company.
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It was simply [new buzzword] -> Start up -> IPO -> Get rich -> Profit!! What you read in the book is how they did it.
About geeks and business, I think its more true vice versa : Business Tycoons != Geeks. They don't know what works and how, while we have many examples of geeks going on to make hugely successful enterprises.
Re:Thank God (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, being a CEO is (really) different from managerial work, but I have an anecdote.
My dad works for Proctor & Gamble. They hire almost exclusively engineers for every position. They figure it's easier to teach an engineer sales/managing/whatever than it is to teach a business type how to engineer. Heck, they pay for some people to get their MBAs - if you could handle an engineering degree, you sure as heck can handle business.
Maybe not many geeks have business acumen - but it seems to be easier to pick up than geekery.
Re:Thank God (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
But it IS the recipe for getting a bogus patent, which in turn leads to tons of cash - for lawyers, anyway.
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I think I will patent "noticing that you just made a dumb error on a
Re:Thank God (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
Please .... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Please .... (Score:5, Funny)
minus the pictures (Score:3, Informative)
Collected here are history's most important failed dotcom businesses, and Web sites that were
Re:Please .... (Score:5, Informative)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2099 [mozilla.org]
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beopen (Score:5, Funny)
When it ran out of money a guy I know came back with T-Shirts. Not the cheap ones you get at trade shows but solid fruit of the loom stuff that lasted me 7 years of constant use (I throw shirts out when they get their first hole) as it turns out that was longer than the company lasted in the first place.
i'm confused (Score:5, Funny)
somewhere, a cliche has just died...
Re:beopen (Score:4, Informative)
you want to start a business and even have some start up money to get going that's great. but you had better carefully plan out the next two years of bills that you know about. as if you start coming up short your screwed.
Re:beopen (Score:5, Insightful)
GP was in part referring to the fact that businesses often expect revenues and profits to come much more quickly than they actually do and have not planned ahead for the initial stages of a start-up. For traditional small businesses, lack of sufficient capital is the main cause of failure for new businesses. I suspect that remains the case with web businesses, even if it sometimes could be more accurately described as over-valuing the worth of your product.
The factors you mention are factors in the failure of a business, and it was a nice touch that you mock someone for talking about planning 5 years ahead and then list poor planning as your first idea of why most businesses fail. Five years may seem like a lifetime to you and the world of tech, but a solid business plan will almost always hold up over that long of a period without a huge amount change. (If you need to make huge changes to your business plan every year, you're probably in your death throes - even for tech companies.) Moreover, a business shouldn't expect profits for at least the first two years of its existence. Five years is a pretty short deadline to expect to get out of start-up mode.
Of course, you can opt to say "It's the web" and then accelerate all of your deadlines by a factor of four. That worked well last time, and I'm sure it'll work well with Web 2.0.
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As someone below said, both him and I were getting at the same things just in different words. There's nothing inaccurate about what I said. Planning is essential: that was not in dispute.
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The problem tech startups have is that they have what they think is a good product and somehow think it will market itself. The real world, especially the business world, doesn't work that way though. You have to plan everything on paper thoroughly to expect success. Otherwise you've just gotten lucky if you make any money at all.
Essentially you and gmack are saying the same t
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One Good Thing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One Good Thing (Score:4, Funny)
No they weren't. Ever try to muffle a fart in an Aeron chair?
deja vu anyone. (Score:2)
Is it the end of the year already?
Pets.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I remember a commercial for "Bar None" credit, where an astoundingly similar sock-puppet declares "because everyone deserves a second chance".
I have no idea if that was intentional or not, but it still makes me laugh to this day.
Re:Pets.com (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pets.com (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pets.com (Score:5, Interesting)
...so yeah. Obviously my memory is a bit faulty; this is one of my all-time favorite commercials, even if I can't remember the sponsoring company. Does anyone remember this commercial? Can someone fill in the blanks, here?
Re:Pets.com (Score:5, Informative)
It was the 2001 eTrade SuperBowl commercial [youtube.com].
...hmm. Maybe I didn't remember it so well, after all.
Re:Pets.com (Score:4, Interesting)
We had a huge number of orders from Alaska. I wondered why this was and checked out the orders. They were all mostly for 50 lb bags of dog food. And we offered free shipping. To Alaska. For 50 lb bags. I mentioned to someone that the shipping costs as much as the dog food. They stopped doing that.
And then I worked in customer support for a few weeks--that was lovely. People called all the time asking us complicated dietary questions. And pet health questions. Ones that would stump a vet. It baffled me every time. Why would you put your beloved pets health into a guy on the phone from a web page selling dog toys?
And one woman called from New York. She ordered a 50 lb bag of dog food and she said it was sitting outside in the hallway and what were going to do about that? I asked if she could get a neighbor to pick it up and bring it inside. She said "This is New York, nobody knows their neighbors." Then I said "I can get UPS to pick it up and return it to us." And she said "that would be fine. How long would it take?" I said "4 to 6 weeks." And she screamed at me. Prolonged screaming. I gave her to somebody else.
A kid from an elementary school asked me how to tell if a rabbit was a boy or a girl. I found a good web page on "sexing rabbits." (Which is what the procedure is called.) I sent the link to the kid and I got called into an office and asked "why am I sending 'sex with rabbits' webpages to kids? I just received an angry call from a parent." I showed her the webpage--it was not 'having sex with rabbits' but 'how to sex rabbits' and showed a bunch of rabbit private part's pictures. I was off the hook.
I miss Dejanews (Score:5, Interesting)
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> was Usenet that contained the useful technical
> information we needed, and when Dejanews was
> the best way to get to it.
Noob. Getting a feed from someone was the best way, and second best was getting a login on a small machine that had the feed. Dejanews was the Harbinger of Death for Usenet.
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AOL was the both the Harbinger AND Vector of Death for Usenet, long before Dejanews even appeared.
Wiki "Eternal september"
(And yes, I know that AOL cut off Usenet access, but google is now filling those shoes, so September drags on...)
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I slrn for those days.
Re:I miss Dejanews (Score:5, Funny)
Alpine (Score:3, Informative)
The new version is under the Apache License V2 and is called Alpine [washington.edu]. It was easier to start the new project with the new license with a name change. If you can get past any prejudices about text-based, menu-driven applications, it kicks butt.
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Speaking of online newsgroups. (Score:2)
Coincidentally... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, the founder wrote a book.
AllTheWeb.com (Score:5, Informative)
FAST could have been Google, it was better, but the upper management decided there was no real money to be made in web search.
Alas, no matter how smart the engineers, or how good the technology, stupid management can screw up a free lunch. Unfortunately, win or lose, they *ALWAYS* get the pay off.
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However, the while google's search results were/are good, the key thing they twigged to earlier than most was how HUGE web advertising was, and how to monetise it. That could have happened in Norway with alltheweb, but it didn't.
When google filed IPO documents people finally understood how HUGE web advertising was.
--Q
Re:AllTheWeb.com (Score:5, Insightful)
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However, we're talking about business models - they got the search business model right, where so many others missed the boat.
--Q
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Agreed, but FAST gave up WAY before then.
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Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, but tell that to the investors. The free market said that Google's original business model wasn't good enough - the tech wasn't good enough apparently.
Unless you have the money and you don't care about any sort of return, when you go into business, you must make a return on investment. And when you have investors, if you squander their money, they
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If you have evidence to the contrary, feel free to enumerate it.
Google made it's IPO and it's billions on advertising, not on search.
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Google was making money with ads on their search before their "AdSense" system.
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My point was that FAST stopped even before that point. Who can say FAST would not have build on the better functionality of the web search, and built more revenue from ads, which would have necessitated their own add engine, which they would have sold public access.
FAST failed because it didn't see the future. And that goes back to my original assertion, management screwed up.
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And if pigs had wings, we'd all wear hats to avoid getting pigshit in our eyes. Or, in other words, you not only have no understanding of the situation, you violently avoid enlightenment so that you can blame the management for not doing something that wouldn't have made them the next Google anyhow
ClubCastLive (Score:4, Interesting)
I think bandwidth costs ate them alive - they streamed in 112 kbps MP3. I managed to snag a few shows before they went Tango Uniform.
CNet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:CNet (Score:4, Informative)
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CNET has had a large userbase for years, and a lot of those users stick around. Loyalty in users is hard to come by.
I used CNET sites almost exclusively for several years, only stopping when I started to rely more on open source products. I still go back there for some things, and even use it as a mirror for my own product.
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Distasters! (Score:4, Funny)
mp3.com (Score:5, Interesting)
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Remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Don't forget Pixelon (Score:4, Interesting)
All of those collapse and goatse.cx still lives on (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All of those collapse and goatse.cx still lives (Score:5, Funny)
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, now seriously, it was just an arse. Admittedly a rather stretched one, but I gather there must be _some_ demand for seeing that on a woman, judging by the whole category of porn and whole sites dedicated to it. I haven't heard of people reeling in shock after being exposed to almost seeing a <insert female pornstar>'s kidneys up her rear end after an anal scene. Or sometimes in the middle of it.
Seriously, it wasn't the most appealing or aesthetically pleasing picture out there, I'll grant that, but I just can't figure out the _horror_ some people claim to have experienced seeing it. It seems a rather disproportionate response. You'd figure that a simple, "hmm, how's this relevant to the topic at hand?" and hitting the back button would be enough for all practical purposes. Horror or shock? Erm, why?
Or was it just the implicit hint of homosexuality that gives the average male in some parts of the world the idea that he must seem properly outraged and horrified by it, lest someone might get the idea that he's gay too? Not trolling, just genuinely trying to figure it out.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Funny)
Could it be, that maybe YOU are the goaste man and are miffed at the negative response you've gotten from your skillfull anal theatrics?
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You know, I don't quite get it. I've seen bigger arseholes in upper management or on the cover of some management magazines, and noone gets a shock at seeing those ;)
Well, now seriously, it was just an arse. Admittedly a rather stretched one, but I gather there must be _some_ demand for seeing that on a woman, judging by the whole category of porn and whole sites dedicated to it. I haven't heard of people reeling in shock after being exposed to almost seeing a <insert female pornstar>'s kidneys up her rear end after an anal scene. Or sometimes in the middle of it.
Seriously, it wasn't the most appealing or aesthetically pleasing picture out there, I'll grant that, but I just can't figure out the _horror_ some people claim to have experienced seeing it. It seems a rather disproportionate response. You'd figure that a simple, "hmm, how's this relevant to the topic at hand?" and hitting the back button would be enough for all practical purposes. Horror or shock? Erm, why?
Or was it just the implicit hint of homosexuality that gives the average male in some parts of the world the idea that he must seem properly outraged and horrified by it, lest someone might get the idea that he's gay too? Not trolling, just genuinely trying to figure it out.
FWIW, I'm not a fan of hard core porn and I find images of a stretched anus or vagina to be... unattractive. That said, I think it's mostly about context. With said pornography, the image is placed in the context of some number of people fucking or masturbating, with some lead up to the image in question (such as searching for said image, or other images in a set getting more and more graphic, or the very fact that the viewer is visiting a website dedicated to such imagery).
To add the requisite bad analo
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Gross, that's pretty obvious. What I can't understan
And the winner is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Jenni Archives (Score:3, Insightful)
Jenni-cam? (Score:3, Interesting)
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APBNews.com (Score:3, Interesting)
That and our own nofuncharlie [archive.org], which went under not because of lack of funding (there never was any in the first place), but because we let some domain-snatchers grab the domain out from under us....
What about Wireplay? (Score:3, Interesting)
When that first started it was, in my opinion, the best online gaming service available. For those who don't know you paid for a connection direct to their servers, not the internet, which made it the fastest gaming experience available in the pre broadband era.
There were gaming leagues, prizes, admins/judges for all games,and the chatroom system was excellent. I don't think their chatroom system has ever been bettered in fact.
All my best gaming memories come from my time as a Wireplay member. I even made skins for lots of clans who played in the leagues.
There was sort of informal feel to the place too, The staff had a webcam in their office that let you watch them work, and they had a log that they wrote whatever came to mind in, who was off sick, what they'd got up to at the weekend, anything.
I don't recall who bought them out, but sometime during the boom they got taken over, and everything turned to shit, somost of the people I knew quit and moved over to barrysworld leagues. I left shortly after the new owner assraped the chatroom system and wrecked its charm.
Now I find that it exists as some sort of free affair, but it's not the same.
Re:What about Wireplay? (Score:4, Funny)
what no Efront? (Score:2)
Kozmo.com (Score:4, Informative)
I kind of knew at the time that they'd never turn a profit, but it was nice while it lasted.
19100 (Score:2)
19100 was the year the tech bubble burst as the Y2K Bug caused the Internet to overflow and crash, and web browsers stopped working and people had to return to their Etch-a-Sketches. (This is why websites popular after 19100, such as My Space, appear to have been designed on an etch-a sketch.)
In 19100, the King of the Internet first started to suspect he would never in fact become a millionaire from the Initial Public Offering of a tech company.
Historical search engines (Score:2, Interesting)
Altavista [altavista.com] seemed to get replaced by google, in rather short order. I can't recall a specific reason I stopped using it, unless it was related to th
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Score one for the good guys. Back when Webcrawler was the bee's knees of search engines, I remember accidentally typing in "webcralwer" once -- we didn't have a bookmark for it on the school computers that I recall -- and accidentally went to a pr0n site instead. I just checked, and it turns out that not only is Webcrawler still around, but they managed to get their hands on "webcralwer.com" and redirect it to the right site.
p
Well... I guess I was out of touch... (Score:2)
List of sites from the link (Score:2)
JenniCam (1996-2004; precursor to Justin.tv)
Boo.com (1998-2000; precursor to: Next.co.uk, et al)
Heat.net (1997-2000; precursor to Xbox Live, PSN)
Nupedia (2000-2003; precursor to Wikipedia)
Webvan (1999-2001, precursor to Tesco.com, et al)
Beenz (1998-2001)
Pets.com (1998-2000; precursor to: PetPlanet, et al)
AudioGalaxy (circa 1998-2002; precursor to: BitTorrent and torrent sites)
Stage6 (2006-2008; precursor to: Veoh.com)
Historical search engines
Circadence (Score:2, Interesting)
Circadence started as a small online games developer (VR-1) with well under a hundred employee and in a very short time grew to just under 500 people, millions of dollars of deployed hardware at 20+ network backbone nodes, a 24 hour NOC, 4 full time customer service people (each making 40k+) all without having a single customer. During this growth, the only money making arm of the company (the games deve
OMM (Score:2)
Google (Score:2)
Like most, they misunderstand Webvan (Score:5, Interesting)
They were a tiered distribution company. They would have become a combination of Wal-Mart without the storefronts and UPS. Their two edges were
1) dis intermediate all the retail outlets that all sell the same things. The profit margin in groceries is razor thin (again, they did the hard thing first). Eliminate the stores and employees, replace them with largely automated warehouses and drivers and you change the entire profit dynamic. Walmart.com and vons.com don't get this benefit since they still have to support physical storefronts. Amazon gets this benefit and does pretty well. People have figured out by now that Amazon isn't just an internet bookstore, Webvan died before it could get there.
2)Use the internet as the front end of the business. That's pretty obvious.
"Webvan -- none of whose senior executives or investors had any experience in the supermarket trade". Umm... yeah, that experience would have been useless since they didn't run supermarkets. They did have one of the main architects of Walmarts inventory and distribution system. They were damn good at what they did. If they had an unhappy customer I never met him.
They died from dried up funding more than overspending (though they did that too). They were just about at the point of doing the "since we have a truck coming by your house anyway, why don't we also drop off your Netflix movie, next semester's textbooks and that creepy Rei Ayanami doll you ordered from Japan?". Without that Netflix has had to spend huge effort to get a (kick ass frankly) distribution system done via USPS. Amazon has their affiliate program where you can get all sorts of odd stuff from Amazon, but they don't have that "last mile" solved. If you order stuff in one order from 7 different affiliates you have to pay 7 different shipping fees and deal with 7 different shipments from different shipping companies. At least one of those shipments will get screwed up and one other will come from some shipper that won't leave it without a signature. Webvan was coming by your house anyway to drop off your groceries.
And, yes, I did indeed ride a small position in WBVN all the way to $0.00. They could have been saved at any point and I still think they would be a huge company today.
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But they dec
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Um, yeah. They were running a supermarket, or at least the faced many of the same problems a supermarket faces - most importantly in inventory management. If Amazon orders too many copies of a book, they can sell them over time or return them to the publisher. Much the same for Netflix. A truckload of tomatoes or mi
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http://www.geologistics.com/ [geologistics.com]
are just a company that sells groceries to cruise lines
flooz? (Score:2)
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